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Frankly, seeing it again now, I don’t know how I managed to do my job the first time we met without tipping my hat and bowing before it with great respect and affection.
“Uh, not to be picky,” Garrett says softly, grabbing my attention and snapping my eyes up to him. He’s watching me with an amused smirk kissing the corner of his lips. “But are you planning to do something with my buddy other than hold him? Or should I settle in for a while?”
A nervous laugh makes a weird sound in my throat. “Oh. Whoops.”
Suddenly back on track, the desperation to feel him inside me roars forward like a biker on Sons of Anarchy.
I climb astride Garrett’s hips, grab the condom from the bed and roll it on, and then guide him inside me until we’re seated fully together.
My eyes close and my head falls back, and Garrett’s groan is so deep and rich, I feel it all the way in my gut.
Sweet Moses, if this isn’t the hottest man I’ve ever seen…
Slowly, so fucking slowly it hurts, I move up and off him before sinking back down in one smooth movement. Both of us gasp.
Garrett is right. I don’t know why or where it came from or how it works, but there’s something between us. Something big.
And I don’t even mean the dick.
Okay, so, yeah, I guess for anyone who’s keeping count, technically, there are two somethings.
Garrett
The sheets to my side feel cold and empty and wrong.
My eyes flutter as I scrape my way up from the depths of sleep to figure out why—why my sheets feel cold and empty and so very wrong.
It’s incredible how they can feel that way now after so much time when sleeping alone has been my norm. Even when I was married to Bethanny, we spent more nights apart than together. If I wasn’t gone fighting fires, she was off to the spa or a girls’ weekend or something like it.
Anything to get some downtime after having to be both herself and me all the time.
I got it then, and I get it now.
It took me forever to understand that just because I knew why it was happening, didn’t mean it was a healthy marriage. I need someone who understands me. My purpose, my drive—why it means enough to me to be gone so much in the first place.
And Bethanny needs someone who can be there, present both emotionally and physically.
I climb out of the cocoon of the bed and out into the chilly night air. The house is quiet, and the sky outside the window is as black as it gets around here.
It’s washed-out—nothing like the black skies of the wilderness when we have to camp out in the middle of it—but it’s bone dead in the middle of the night with a moonless sky for sure.
I walk on soft steps down the hall from my bedroom, peeking into my kids’ empty rooms as I pass them, and into the office at the end of the hall that I keep full of all manner of shit. Pictures with the guys that we’ve taken out in the field, newspaper articles about things that interest me, the articles Holley wrote about Jake—something I actually kept for his sake, just in case he was too big of a moron at the time to do it himself—and some of my memorabilia from my years playing football.
And not too surprisingly, that’s where I find Lauren.
I watch her for a minute, her tiny, delicate fingers sliding over the edge of each shelf as she studies the pictures on it intently.
She bites at her bottom lip and leans forward when she sees one of Jake and me with our kids, and I smile.
He’s a handsome bastard, even I know that.
I cross my arms and lean into the doorjamb.
“Find what you’re looking for?”
“Gah!” Lauren jumps and spins around, tangling her feet in the blanket wrapped around her and ramming her shoulder into the wall unceremoniously. I jump into action, leaping clear across the room to right her on her feet, and a thick fall of brownish-blond hair slides right in front of her face.
She giggles, and any darkness about her slipping out of bed in the middle of the night lifts immediately.
“I’m sorry,” she apologizes. “I didn’t mean to…snoop. I just couldn’t sleep, and before I knew it, I was in here…snooping.”
I shake my head. “I don’t have anything to hide, Lauren. Look anywhere you want. I don’t mind.”
“Well, thank you. But I really wasn’t trying to snoop. I just couldn’t sleep.”
I smile cheekily. “I think I have a solution for that.”
Lauren laughs. “I love your enthusiasm, but after everything we just did, my vagina needs five to seven hours to recuperate, or she’s going to get revenge with a UTI.”
